High anxiety over Korea: Amid bellicose rhetoric, a warning from China

An F/A-18C Hornet prepares to launch from the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson during deployment in the Western Pacific, April 10, 2017. The photo was released by the U.S. Navy. With signs indicating that North Korea could be planning a nuclear or missile test as early as Saturday, April 15, 2017, a United States Navy strike group led by the Carl Vinson is steaming toward the Korean Peninsula in a show of force. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Jake Cannady via The New York Times) less

An F/A-18C Hornet prepares to launch from the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson during deployment in the Western Pacific, April 10, 2017. The photo was released by the U.S. Navy. With signs indicating that North ... more

Photo: MCSA Jake Cannady, HO / NYT

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Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi delivers a speech at the China Development Forum 2017 on March 20, 2017 in Beijing, China.(Li Xin/Xinhua/Sipa USA/TNS)

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi delivers a speech at the China Development Forum 2017 on March 20, 2017 in Beijing, China.(Li Xin/Xinhua/Sipa USA/TNS)

Photo: Xinhua, MBR / TNS

High anxiety over Korea: Amid bellicose rhetoric, a warning from China

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Feeling anxious about North Korea?

Some people I know are, posting about it on Facebook, text messaging me and talking about it at the office. They're asking if we're on the verge of war, but I don't know. President's Trump's rhetoric, his order to send a Navy carrier group to the region and what we know of Pyongyang's drive to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile have all converged.

The Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi’s thoughts on the subject won't make you feel any better.

“The United States and South Korea and North Korea are engaging in tit for tat, with swords drawn and bows bent, and there have been storm clouds gathering,” wire services reported him saying. “If they let war break out on the peninsula, they must shoulder that historical culpability and pay the corresponding price for this.”

That sounds like a threat. It could be friendly counsel, of course, along the lines of what China told the United States during the Korean War, when UN forces led by the Army and Marines drove into North Korea and neared the Yalu River. Beijing said it would enter the war and kept its word.

In overreaching, the United States snatched defeat from the jaws of a stunning victory.

The first six months of the war saw North Korean forces sweep across most of the peninsula before Gen. Douglas MacArthur drove them back. The whole thing appeared to be all but over by October, 1950, but there were hints of trouble. Captured Chinese soldiers warned there were hundreds of thousands of soldiers just like them waiting in the hills.

Some of you know the rest of the story.

China sent 21 divisions into battle two days after Thanksgiving, leaving MacArthur’s command stunned. The U.S. Eighth Army was bludgeoned as it ran a river gauntlet in a retreat that became a rout. Part of the Chinese force intended to encircle and destroy the 1st Marines at the Chosin Reservoir, but the Americans fought their way out.

“There were so few of us and so many of them,” a Marine veteran of the battle, Werner W. “Ronnie” Reininger, told me a couple of years back. “I didn’t think I was going to live. My birthday’s in May and every May since 1950 I look up and say, ‘See, I beat you! I got to see one more birthday.’”

The fighting settled into a World War I scene, with men on both sides dying in large numbers over feet and inches, until an armistice that has held, without a peace treaty, for more than 60 years.

I’d guess this isn’t what Wang Yi is talking about, but it’s on my mind after 16 years of war, after meeting so many wounded and getting to know the families of the dead, and after covering so many funerals at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery. It’s been a miserable time for those folks, the 1 percent who’ve given everything to our long war on terrorism. Ask the wife whose husband, an amputee, can’t sleep because he suffers phantom pain. Ask the mother who grieves for her son years after his death.

Ask the soldier or Marine who celebrates his “Alive Day.”

If you haven’t been connected to our forever war other than slapping a magnetic yellow ribbon on your car, you can be sure of this: A war in Korea won’t be anything like the last two in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s why some people are so worried.